


sugar

by DaScribbla



Series: for the wages of sin is death [2]
Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Character Study, F/M, Racism, Religious Content, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 15:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11694840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaScribbla/pseuds/DaScribbla
Summary: Ophelia should know better than to break her own heart.





	sugar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dinochickennugget](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dinochickennugget/gifts).



> Romans 13:10 - Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

 

The evening had cooled off just enough that Ophelia could venture out of doors without feeling as though she were being cooked alive.

She stroked one of her roses with a fingertip, assessed how it hung in relation to the rest of the blossoms on the vine outside the house, and decided that she would tie it more securely to the trellis before she left for work tomorrow.

If she didn’t quit first.

Ophelia had worked as a secretary for several families before this one, and she’d never felt an atmosphere like this. Hot and angry and evil, like a snake on melting blacktop. Her father had asked her earlier that day how she could stand to work for them — when the woman married her husband’s brother barely two months after her husband was interred. (The gossips of the town would sometimes seize upon her proximity to the family and press her for intimate details; she tactfully said nothing about the morning she’d found her employer heaving out her guts into the kitchen sink, and how she’d begged Ophelia to say nothing to her son.)

Why, her father asked, did she insist on staying on?

It was a gentler reason that what Ophelia suspected had brought her employer and her new husband together. 

It was Hamlet leaning on the door frame and waiting for her to finish her typing so they could talk. It was the evening that he’d taught her the basics of piano — that had been his birthday party, his eighteenth, and they’d stolen away to the parlor to be alone as thunder rumbled far off like the purring of a lion. 

_“You’re like sugar,”_ he’d told her, _“melting in the rain.”_

_On your tongue, too,_ she’d thought about saying, but had decided against it. Hamlet was like an old man sometimes, in his sensibilities.

It was her, and Hamlet, and Horatio down at the boat house, Horatio humming along as he strummed his guitar, and Hamlet dancing with her. Laughter in the balmy evening, the moon pearlescent in the river’s dark waves. 

It was the sparkle in his eye that had been absent ever since his father’s killing. Lately, she hadn’t so much as heard him speak, save for one instance when she’d found him on the porch, an open Bible across his lap and an unopened bottle of whiskey by his feet. He’d turned to her — he was like glass, and Ophelia always had the fancy that she could somehow see straight through him — and said, _“Lazarus.”_

_“What about him?”_ she’d asked, sitting in the rocking chair beside his. 

_“I was reading about him. I was wondering about what he must have seen before he returned to the living. And if he might not have preferred to stay dead.”_

She hadn’t known what to say to that and so reached over to squeeze his hand.

But he had pulled away, and she'd had understanding enough to know that whatever he sought, it wasn't her.

 

She came back to herself to realize that she had begun to weep, shuddering, breathy little sobs that made her shoulders shake. With quick and angry fingers, she twisted the blossom from its stem and wrenched the petals apart, like a violent version of a game she played when she was younger, sillier. 

_He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves…_

And she came back to herself again.

The rose was nothing but a mess of torn pink-red petals scattered over the prickly green grass and a thorny, headless stem that bobbed on the trellis.

Above her, the sky stretched dusky purple and bottomless, and Ophelia was suddenly seized with the terrible wish that she could smother herself in it, or float up, up, up, up like a balloon that some forgetful child had let go of.

She wondered if she were going crazy — like poor Hamlet, her subconscious whispered, but she pushed that thought away because she didn’t want to believe it.

 

Yellow light suddenly flooded the deep purple evening; footsteps sounded on the porch a few yards away.

“Hey, sugar?”

Her brother. She wiped away the worst of her tears and coughed against the lump in her throat. “Laertes?”

His silhouette moved down the porch steps, floated towards her. “I’d wondered where you’d got to.”

“Just checking the roses.” It was dark enough now that the headless rose wasn’t immediately visible. 

He wrapped his arms around her from behind, and she leaned back against him, grateful for the embrace. 

“You all right?” he asked after they’d stayed that way for a while. 

She swayed back and forth in his arms, studying the roses, now mere suggestions of flowers in the dark.

“Are you?”

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Laertes began. She turned in his arms, looked at him. It was the sort of tone he used when he wanted her to listen up, pay attention — it wasn’t her fault that her mind could never focus, or rather, that it focused too much on the wrong things. She floated from topic to topic like a honeybee in a garden full of wildflowers. Laertes was her rock, her anchor, weighing her low to the earth, wrapping her in rich soil.

“All right?”

He was faceless in the dark. “I want you to be careful. Over there.” _Over there_ was their code for her place of employment. 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean _him.”_ He squeezed her hand. “I don’t want you to get your heart broken.”

“Laertes —“

“Do you think this town would ever let you marry a rich white boy?” He said it quite gently, despite the harshness of the words themselves. “I know how you feel about him, sugar,” he added. “But just because they’ll accept a black minister doesn’t mean they’ll allow —“

She placed a finger against his lips. “You don’t need to tell me what I already know.”

“I don’t want to see you hurt.”

Underfoot, she felt the softness of one of the rose petals she’d torn apart. She suddenly wanted a bath. Wash the heat of the night off herself. 

“I know.”

“Horatio’s a nice boy —“ Laertes began.

“— and you know as well as I do that that’ll never be,” she finished.

Be sweet, be palatable, don’t embarrass anyone with your strangeness, don’t alarm anyone with your own desires, your own ambitions.

Sugar.

The tears came again without warning, and she buried her head in her brother’s shoulder.

 

The truth, she reflected later as she filled the ivory porcelain bath in their bathroom, was that as much as the atmosphere choked her, she couldn’t wait to return to work. There was such evil there beneath the facades they constructed — and yet, Gertrude was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mother; her new husband was like an uncle, or a rather a cousin who told good jokes and made even better martinis; and Hamlet… 

The pain of having him there was almost as terrible as the pain of not. Could she choke down the sour with the sweet as if it were rotting candy, with a smile on her face? Smile, smile, smile. 

The water was scalding hot against her skin, quivering against the sides of the bath, around her limbs. A headache pulsed in her temples.

She pulled her lips into an ugly grimace, baring her teeth, and sank beneath the fractious, greeny surface of the bath.

**Author's Note:**

> Main - @williamshakennotstirred  
> Shakespeare - @princehalsdaddyissues
> 
> Drop a comment if you liked it!


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